Edifício Master

This ever surprising documentary about the residents of a huge building located at Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro, touches our very souls with the bitter-sweet stories of people (almost) like us. From the old couple always quarrelling about each other's idiosyncrasies to the young woman which sells her body but doesn't loose the girlish sparkles of her eyes, Coutinho takes us by hand on a trip over a very familiar, still astonishingly strange, place. Prepare yourself to laughs and cries.

My mother has a friend who has lived in Edifício Master for over 20 years. So I have been to the building several times over all these years, mostly during my childhood. I recently met her and we spoke about the movie. She hated that it was made, and refused to be interviewed. She also did not watch the movie herself. There is a big stigma associated to buildings like Ed. Master (there are a few like it in Copacabana, but not that many). There are even stories about buildings that had their street numbers changed, so bad the reputation they earned, always in connection with prostitution and drug dealing. What I like about the movie, is that it shows that it is true that prostitutes do live there, but also that everyone is a human being, with often complex feelings. It is interesting to see how important it was for several of those interviewed to live in Copacabana, a famous postcard from Rio. Almost all of those are not from Rio, which adds a little to the postcard effect. Copacabana is indeed a very diverse, I'd even say strange place. Many tourists, a lot of violence, many street-kids snorting glue, smoking dope, a huge number of prostitutes. Both female and male (mostly transvestites). The only thing I think was missing was a transsexual interviewee (I'm sure there are some living there).

In Copacabana, in a low middle-class twelve floor building called "Master", with two hundred and seventy-six apartments and more than five hundred dwellers, Eduardo Coutinho and his crew have rented an apartment for a month and have interviewed thirty-seven inhabitants.

This documentary may be an interesting sociological study of the heterogeneous people living in a metropolis like Rio de Janeiro, or for a monograph work of students of cinema, but I found it very boring for a commercial DVD. I have never caught the point, the objective of this footage. I do not like reality shows, I have never watched "Big Brother" or any other similar show and therefore I have no interest in the intimacy of the dwellers of that horrible building. "Edifício Master" was awarded as the best documentary of 2002 "Festival de Gramado", but I did not like it. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Edifício Master" ("Master Building")

Imagine it: The Human Network. Reality TV that actually has something to do with reality; that gets to the essence of how people are. Like a music video channel, except instead they show clips of everyday people from a building in Copacabana (or a farm in Kansas, or a kibbutz in Israel), each talking for two or five minutes about what makes them happy and what makes them not - you'd never run out of material; people could even send in their own tapes ("America's Humanest Home Videos"), although this would also give them the freedom to do useless things. There are no useless things here, although some moments are better than others: it was the expansion of the old stereotypes that really got to me - so this is how a hooker with a heart of gold feels about being one; and here's the sort of guy Sinatra sang "My Way" for. It's rather uncinematic, though - I wish they had found a way to edit the material into something denser, perhaps by organising it thematically. And there isn't that sense of the institution as an organism, that Frederick Wiseman would've evoked. Hence I don't know if what you see here is any more worthwhile than chatting to each of the other people in the theatre with you, but when did you last do that? The movie's moderately recommended, the TV channel idea is something you should urge Ted Turner to do.

A total of 53 IMDB voters gave this film a 9.0 I'd like to know EXACTLY what they were smoking while watching this. "Master, a building in Copacabana" is the story of several tenants that reside in a Rio de Janeiro apartment building. We are told it is near the beach but virtually all of this film was shot in the dwellings and halls of this complex. On the plus side, director Eduardo Continho finds some interesting people to talk to. Unfortunately, the entire film is made up of only two things: dozens of interviews with these people, and the film crew shuttling from one door to another. I'll say this; don't expect a Brazilian "action" film! Clocking in at 110 minutes, it's about 20 minutes too long. 6/10